In the last decade, many Natural Language Processing tasks have matured to a point where semantic questions, ranging from paraphrasing to relevance assessment to disambiguation, are coming into the focus of attention. This symposium aims at bringing together researchers from different strands of research on semantic processing, with a focus on two aspects.

The first is the textual inference paradigm, proposed as a unifying generic framework that captures major semantic processing needs in different application areas. Textual entailment research has yielded so far a range of inference algorithms, which were mostly developed within individual ‘in-house’ systems. The symposium aims at addressing current bottlenecks by discussing future research directions and perspectives for consolidation and unification of textual inference technology. The second aspect concerns linguistic structures, as identified by empirical work within corpus linguistics, whose benefit for Computational Linguistics has not yet been fully realized. The aim of the symposium is to suggest progress towards models of language that facilitate successful processing of semantic knowledge in natural language applications.

The Symposium is a joint event supported by the EU-funded project EXCITEMENT (http://www.excitement-project.eu/), which aims to set up a generic architecture and a comprehensive open-source platform for multilingual textual inference, and by the B-CROCE project, which is the beneficiary of a Marie Curie Integration grant dedicated to finding regular structures as patterns in corpora. The symposium benefits from the participation of a large number of keynote presentations by people whose research has had a significant impact on semantic processing.

The symposium aims at providing a stimulating and intriguing forum for mutual update and discussion of these research directions in semantic processing, and we hope to attract a substantial number of involved senior and junior researchers worldwide. To that end, the symposium will have a special structure, including:

- A large number of keynote presentations by people whose research has had a significant impact in semantic processing- Presentations of submitted papers (oral and poster sessions)- Two panel discussions (one on each aspect of the symposium)- Two tutorials: the textual-inference tutorial will present the new open-source platform provided by the EXCITEMENT project (inference engines, modules and knowledge resources); the other tutorial will focus on corpus patterns (theoretical and computational aspects of corpus pattern analysis, sense-stable patterns, chain clarifying relationships, frames, argument structures). Both tutorials include a hands-on session.

Authors are invited to submit papers on work in the topic areas of this workshop. We distinguish two types of papers:

- Long papers present completed work and should not exceed 8 pages (plus any number of additional pages with references only)- Short papers present work in progress and should not exceed 4 pages (plus two additional pages of references)

Papers are to be submitted via the symposium EasyChair submission page:

As reviewing will be blind, please ensure that papers are anonymous. The papers should not include the authors' names and affiliations or any references to web sites, project names etc. revealing the authors' identity.